The Trail Book by Mary Austin et al

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"Three days," said the Dog Chief, "the preparation lasted. Wolf Face and
Tall Bull were sent off to keep in touch with the enemy, and the women
and children dropped behind while the men unwrapped their Medicine
bundles and began the Mysteries of the _Issiwun_, the Buffalo Hat, and
_Mahuts_, the Arrows. It was a long ceremony, and we three, Red Morning,
the Suh-tai boy, and I, were on fire with the love of fighting. You may
believe that we made the other boys treat us handsomely because we had
been with the scouts, but after a while even that grew tame and we
wandered off toward the river. Who cared what three half-grown boys did,
while the elders were busy with their Mysteries.

"By and by, though we knew very well that no one should move toward the
enemy while the Arrows were uncovered, it came into our heads what a
fine thing it would be if we could go out after Wolf Face and Tall Bull,
and perhaps count coup on the Pawnees before our men came up with them.
I do not think we thought of any harm, and perhaps we thought the
Medicine of the Arrows was only for the members of the societies. But we
saw afterward that it was for the Tribe, and for our wrong the
Tribe suffered.

"For a while we followed the trail of Tall Bull, toward the camp of
Pawnees. But we took to playing that the buffaloes were Pawnees and wore
out our horses charging them. Then we lost the trail, and when at last
we found a village the enemy had moved on following the hunt, leaving
only bones and ashes. I do not know what we should have done," said the
Dog Chief, "if we had come up with them: three boys armed with
hunting-knives and bows, and a lance which War Bonnet had thrown away
because it was too light for him. Red Morning had a club he had made,
with a flint set into the side. He kept throwing it up and catching it
as he rode, making a song about it.

"After leaving the deserted camp of the Pawnees, we rode about looking
for a trail, thinking we might come upon some small party. We had left
our own camp before finding out what Wolf Face and Tall Bull had come
back to tell them, that the enemy, instead of being the whole Nation of
Pawnees as we supposed, was really only the tribe of the Kitkahhahki,
helped out by a band of the Potawatami. The day before our men attacked
the Kitkahhahki, the Potawatami had separated from them and started up
one of the creeks, while the Pawnees kept on up the river. We boys
stumbled on the trail of the Potawatami and followed it.

"Now these Potawatami," said the Dog Chief, "had had guns a long time,
and better guns than ours. But being boys we did not know enough to turn
back. About midday we came to level country around the headwaters of the
creek, and there were four Potawatami skinning buffaloes. They had
bunched up their horses and tied them to a tree while they cut up the
kill. Red Morning said for us to run off the horses, and that would be
almost as good as a scalp-taking. We left our ponies in the ravine and
wriggled through the long grass. We had cut the horses loose and were
running them, before the Potawatami discovered it. One of them called
his own horse and it broke out of the bunch and ran toward him. In a
moment he was on his back, so we three each jumped on a horse and began
to whip them to a gallop. The Potawatami made for the Suh-tai, and rode
even with him. I think he saw it was only a boy, and neither of them had
a gun. But suddenly as their horses came neck and neck Suh-tai gave a
leap and landed on the Potawatami's horse behind the rider. It was a
trick of his with which he used to scare us. He would leap on and off
before you had time to think. As he clapped his legs to the horse's back
he stuck his knife into the Potawatami. The man threw up his arms and
Suh-tai tumbled him off the horse in an instant.

"This I saw because Red Morning's horse had been shot under him, and I
had stopped to take him up. By this time another man had caught a horse
and I had got my lance again which I had left leaning against a tree. I
faced him with it as he came on at a dead run, and for a moment I
thought it had gone clean through him, but really it had passed between
his arm and his body and he had twisted it out of my hand.

"Our horses were going too fast to stop, but Red Morning, from behind
me, struck at the head of the man's horse as it passed with his
knife-edged club, and we heard the man shout as he went down. I managed
to get my horse about in time to see Suh-tai, who had caught up with us,
trying to snatch the Potawatami's scalp, but his knife turned on one of
the silver plates through which his scalp-lock was pulled, and all the
Suh-tai got was a lock of the hair. In his excitement he thought it was
the scalp and went shaking it and shouting like a wild man.

"The Potawatami pulled himself free of his fallen horse as I came up,
and it did me good to see the blood flowing from under his arm where my
lance had scraped him. I rode straight at him, meaning to ride him down,
but the horse swerved a little and got a long wiping stroke from the
Potawatami's knife, from which, in a minute more, he began to stagger.
By this time the other men had got their guns and begun shooting.
Suh-tai's bow had been shot in two, and Red Morning had a graze that
laid his cheek open. So we got on our own ponies and rode away.

"We saw other men riding into the open, but they had all been chasing
buffaloes, and our ponies were fresh. It was not long before we left the
shooting behind. Once we thought we heard it break out again in a
different direction, but we were full of our own affairs, and anxious to
get back to the camp and brag about them. As we crossed the creek
Suh-tai made a line and said the words that made it Medicine. We felt
perfectly safe.

"It was our first fight, and each of us had counted coup. Suh-tai was
not sure but he had killed his man. Not for worlds would he have wiped
the blood from his knife until he had shown it to the camp. Two of us
had wounds, for my man had struck at me as he passed, though I had been
too excited to notice it at the time ... '_Eyah!_' said the Dog
Chief,--'a man's first scar ...!' We were very happy, and Red Morning
taught us his song as we rode home beside the Republican River.

"As we neared our own camp we were checked in our rejoicing; we heard
the wails of the women, and then we saw the warriors sitting around with
their heads in their blankets--as many as were left of them. My father
was gone, he was one of the first who was killed by the Potawatami."

The Dog Chief was silent a long time, puffing gently on his pipe, and
the Officer of the Yellow Rope began to sing to himself a strange,
stirring song.

Looking at him attentively Oliver saw an old faint scar running across
his face from nose to ear.

"Is your name Red Morning?" Oliver wished to know.

The man nodded, but he did not smile; they were all of them smoking
silently with their eyes upon the ground. Oliver understood that there
was more and turned back to the Dog Chief.

"Weren't they pleased with what you had done?" he asked.

"They were pleased when they had time to notice us," he said, "but they
didn't know--they didn't know that we had broken the Medicine of the
Arrows. It didn't occur to us to say anything about the time we had left
the camp, and nobody asked us. A young warrior, Big Head he was called,
had also gone out toward the enemy before the Mystery was over. They
laid it all to him.

"And at that time we didn't know ourselves, not till long afterward. You
see, we thought we had got away from the Potawatami because our ponies
were fresh and theirs had been running buffaloes. Rut the truth was they
had followed us until they heard the noise of the shooting where Our
Folks attacked the Kitkahhahki. It was the first they knew of the attack
and they went to the help of their friends. Until they came Our Folks
had all the advantage. But the Potawatami shoot to kill. They carry
sticks on which to rest the guns, and their horses are trained to stand
still. Our men charged them as they came, but the Potawatami came
forward by tens to shoot, and loaded while other tens took their places
... and the Medicine of the Arrows had been broken. The men of the
Potawatami took the hearts of our slain to make strong Medicine for
their bullets and when the Cheyennes saw what they were doing they
ran away.

"But if we three had not broken the Medicine, the Potawatami would never
have been in that battle.

"Thus it is," said the Dog Soldier, putting his pipe in his belt and
gathering his robes about him, "that wars are lost and won, not only in
battle, but in the minds and the hearts of the people, and by the
keeping of those things that are sacred to the people, rather than by
seeking those things that are pleasing to one's self. Do you understand
this, my son?"

"I think so," said Oliver, remembering what he had heard at school. He
felt the hand of the Dog Chief on his shoulder, but when he looked up it
was only the Museum attendant come to tell him it was closing time.

THE END

APPENDIX

GLOSSARY OF INDIAN AND SPANISH NAMES

THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL

The appendix is that part of a book in which you find the really
important things, put there to keep them from interfering with the
story. Without an appendix you might not discover that all of the
important things in this book really _are_ true.

All the main traveled roads in the United States began as animal or
Indian trails. There is no map that shows these roads as they originally
were, but the changes are not so many as you might think. Railways have
tunneled under passes where the buffalo went over, hills have been cut
away and swamps filled in, but the general direction and in many places
the actual grades covered by the great continental highways remain
the same.

THE BUFFALO COUNTRY

_Licks_ are places where deer and buffaloes went to lick the salt they
needed out of the ground. They were once salt springs or lakes
long dried up.

_Wallows_ were mudholes where the buffaloes covered themselves with mud
as a protection from mosquitoes and flies. They would lie down and work
themselves into the muddy water up to their eyes. Crossing the Great
Plains, you can still see round green places that were wallows in the
days of the buffalo.

The Pawnees are a roving tribe, in the region of the Platte and Kansas
Rivers. If they were just setting out on their journey when the children
heard them they would sing:--

"Dark against the sky, yonder distant line
Runs before us.
Trees we see, long the line of trees
Bending, swaying in the wind.

"Bright with flashing light, yonder distant line
Runs before us.
Swiftly runs, swift the river runs,
Winding, flowing through the land."

But if they happened to be crossing the river at the time they would be
singing to _Kawas_, their eagle god, to help them. They had a song for
coming up on the other side, and one for the mesas, with long,
flat-sounding lines, and a climbing song for the mountains.

You will find all these songs and some others in a book by Miss Fletcher
in the public library.

TRAIL TALK

You will find the story of the Coyote and the Burning Mountain in my
book _The Basket Woman_.

The Tenasas were the Tennessee Mountains. Little River is on the map.

Flint Ridge is a great outcrop of flint stone in Ohio, near the town of
Zanesville. Sky-Blue-Water is Lake Superior.

Cahokia is the great mound near St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the
river.

When the Lenni-Lenape speaks of a Telling of his Fathers about the
mastodon or the mammoth, he was probably thinking of the story that is
pictured on the Lenape stone, which seems to me to be the one told by
Arrumpa. Several Indian tribes had stories of a large extinct animal
which they called the Big Moose, or the Big Elk, because moose and elk
were the largest animals they knew.

ARRUMPA'S STORY

I am not quite certain of the places mentioned in this story, because
the country has so greatly changed, but it must have been in Florida or
Georgia, probably about where the Savannah River is now. It is in that
part of the country we have the proof that man was here in America at
the same time as the mammoth.

Shell mounds occur all along the coast. No doubt the first permanent
trails led to them from the hunting-grounds. Every year the tribe went
down to gather sea-food, and left great piles of shells many feet deep,
sometimes covering several acres. It is from these mounds that we
discover the most that we know about early man in the United States.

There are three different opinions as to where the first men in America
came from. First, that they came from some place in the North that is
now covered with Arctic ice; second, that they came from Europe and
Africa by way of some islands that are now sunk beneath the Atlantic
Ocean; third, that they came from Asia across Behring Strait and the
Aleutian Islands.

The third theory seems the most reasonable. But also it is very likely
that some people did come from the lost islands in the Atlantic, and
left traces in South America and the West Indies. It may be that Dorcas
Jane and Oliver will yet meet somebody in the Museum country who can
tell them about it.

The Great Cold that Arrumpa speaks about must have been the Ice Age,
that geologists tell us once covered the continent of North America,
almost down to the Ohio River. It came and went slowly, and probably so
changed the climate that the elephants, tigers, camels, and other
animals that used to be found in the United States could no longer
live in it.

THE COYOTE'S STORY

_Tamal-Pyweack_--Wall-of-Shining-Rocks--is an Indian name for the Rocky
Mountains. _Backbone-of-the-World_ is another.

The Country of the Dry Washes is between the Rockies and the Sierra
Nevadas, toward the south. A dry wash is the bed of a river that runs
only in the rainy season. As such rivers usually run very swiftly, they
make great ragged gashes across a country.

There are several places in the Rockies called _Wind Trap_. The Crooked
Horn might have been Pike's Peak, as you can see by the pictures. The
white men had to rediscover this trail for themselves, for the Indians
seemed to have forgotten it, but the railroad that passes through the
Rockies, near Pike's Peak, follows the old trail of the Bighorn.

It is very likely that the Indian in America had the dog for his friend
as soon as he had fire, if not before it. Most of the Indian stories of
the origin of fire make the coyote the first discoverer and bringer of
fire to man. The words that Howkawanda said before he killed the Bighorn
were probably the same that every Indian hunter uses when he goes
hunting big game: "O brother, we are about to kill you, we hope that you
will understand and forgive us." Unless they say something like that the
spirit of the animal killed might do them some mischief.

THE CORN WOMAN'S STORY

Indian corn, _mahiz_, or maize, is supposed to have come originally from
Central America. But the strange thing about it is that no specimen of
the wild plant from which it might have developed has ever been found.
This would indicate that the development must have taken place a very
long time ago, and the parent corn may have belonged to the age of the
mastodon and other extinct creatures.

Different tribes probably brought it into the United States at different
times. Some of it came up the Atlantic Coast, across the West Indies.
The fragments of legend from which I made the story of the Corn Woman
were found among the Indians that were living in Virginia, Kentucky, and
Tennessee at the time the white men came.

Chihuahua is a province and city in Old Mexico, the trail that leads to
it one of the oldest lines of tribal migration on the continent.

To be given to the Sun meant to have your heart cut out on a sacrificial
stone, usually on the top of a hill, or other high place. The Aztecs
were an ancient Mexican people who practiced this kind of sacrifice as a
part of their religion. If it was from them the Corn Woman obtained the
seed, it must have been before they moved south to Mexico City, where
the Spaniards found them in the sixteenth century.

A _teocali_ was an Aztec temple.

MOKE-ICHA'S STORY

A _tipi_ is the sort of tent used by the Plains Indians, made of tanned
skins. It is sometimes called a _lodge_, and the poles on which the
skins are hung are usually cut from the tree which for this reason is
called the lodge-pole pine. It is important to remember things like
this. By knowing the type of house used, you can tell more about the
kind of life lived by that tribe than by any other one thing. When the
poles were banked up with earth the house was called an _earth lodge_.
If thatched with brush and grass, a _wickiup_. In the eastern United
States, where huts were covered with bark, they were generally called
_wigwams_. In the desert, if the house was built of sticks and earth or
brush, it was called a _hogan_, and if of earth made into rude bricks,
a _pueblo_.

The Queres Indians live all along the Rio Grande in pueblos, since there
is no need of their living now in the cliffs. You can read about them at
Ty-uonyi in "The Delight-Makers."

A _kiva_ is the underground chamber of the house, or if not underground,
at least without doors, entered from the top by means of a ladder.

_Shipapu_, the place from which the Queres and other pueblo Indians
came, means, in the Queres language, "Black Lake of Tears," and
according to the Zuni, "Place of Encompassing Mist," neither of which
sounds like a pleasant place to live. Nevertheless, all the Queres
expect to go there when they die. It is the Underworld from which the
Twin Brothers led them when the mud of the earliest world was scarcely
dried, and they seem to have gone wandering about until they found
Ty-uonyi, where they settled.

The stone puma, which Moke-icha thought was carved in her honor, can
still be seen on the mesa back from the river, south of Tyuonyi. But the
Navajo need not have made fun of the Cliff-Dwellers for praying to a
puma, since the Navajos of to-day still say their prayers to the bear.
The Navajos are a wandering tribe, and pretend to despise all people who
live in fixed dwellings.

The "ghosts of prayer plumes," which Moke-icha saw in the sky, is the
Milky Way. The Queres pray by the use of small feathered sticks planted
in the ground or in crevices of the rocks in high and lonely places. As
the best feathers for this purpose are white, and as everything is
thought of by Indians as having a spirit, it was easy for them to think
of that wonderful drift of stars across the sky as the spirits of
prayers, traveling to Those Above. If ever you should think of making a
prayer plume for yourself, do not on any account use the feathers of owl
or crow, as these are black prayers and might get you accused of
witchcraft.

The _Uakanyi_, to which Tse-tse wished to belong, were the Shamans of
War; they had all the secrets of strategy and spells to protect a man
from his enemies. There were also Shamans of hunting, of medicine and
priestcraft.

It was while the Queres were on their way from Shipapu that the
Delight-Makers were sent to keep the people cheerful. The white mud with
which they daubed themselves is a symbol of light, and the corn leaves
tied in their hair signify fruitfulness, for the corn needs cheering up
also. There must be something in it, for you notice that clowns, whose
business it is to make people laugh, always daub themselves with white.

THE MOUND-BUILDER'S STORY

The Mound-Builders lived in the Mississippi Valley about a thousand
years ago. They built chiefly north of the Ohio River, until they were
driven out by the Lenni-Lenape about five hundred years before the
English and French began to settle that country. They went south and are
probably the same people we know as Creeks and Cherokees.

_Tallegewi_ is the only name for the Mound-Builders that has come down
to us, though some people insist that it ought to be _Allegewi_, and the
singular instead of being _Tallega_ should be _Allega_.

The _Lenni-Lenape_ are the tribes we know as Delawares. The name means
"Real People."

The _Mingwe_ or _Mingoes_ are the tribes that the French called
Iroquois, and the English, Five Nations. They called themselves "People
of the Long House." _Mingwe_ was the name by which they were known to
other tribes, and means "stealthy," "treacherous." All Indian tribes
have several names.

The _Onondaga_ were one of the five nations of the Iroquois. They lived
in western New York.

_Shinaki_ was somewhere in the great forest of Canada. _Namaesippu_
means "Fish River," and must have been that part of the St. Lawrence
between Lakes Erie and Huron.

The _Peace Mark_ was only one of the significant ways in which Indians
painted their faces. The marks always meant as much to other Indians as
the device on a knight's shield meant in the Middle Ages.

_Scioto_ means "long legs," in reference to the river's many branches.

_Wabashiki_ means "gleaming white," on account of the white limestone
along its upper course. _Maumee_ and _Miami_ are forms of the same word,
the name of the tribe that once lived along those waters.

_Kaskaskia_ is also the name of a tribe and means, "They scrape them
off," or something of that kind, referring to the manner in which they
get rid of their enemies, the Peorias.

The Indian word from which we take _Sandusky_ means "cold springs," or
"good water, here," or "water pools," according to the person who
uses it.

You will find all these places on the map.

"_G'we_!" or "_Gowe_!" as it is sometimes written, was the war cry of
the Lenape and the Mingwe on their joint wars. At least that was the way
it sounded to the people who heard it. Along the eastern front of these
nations it was softened to "_Zowie_!" and in that form you can hear the
people of eastern New York and Vermont still using it as slang.

THE ONONDAGA'S STORY

The _Red Score_ of the Lenni-Lenape was a picture writing made in red
chalk on birch bark, telling how the tribe came down out of Shinaki and
drove out the Tallegewi in a hundred years' war. Several imperfect
copies of it are still in existence and one nearly perfect
interpretation made for the English colonists. It was in the nature of
short-hand memoranda of the most interesting items of their tribal
history, but unless Oliver and Dorcas Jane meet somebody in the Museum
country who knew the Tellings that went with the Red Score, it is
unlikely we shall ever know just what did happen.

Any early map of the Ohio Valley, or any good automobile map of the
country south and east of the Great Lakes, will give the
_Muskingham-Mahoning Trail_, which was much used by the first white
settlers in that country. The same is true of the old Iroquois Trade
Trail, as it is still a well-traveled country road through the heart of
New York State. _Muskingham_ means "Elk's Eye," and referred to the
clear brown color of the water. _Mahoning_ means "Salt Lick," or, more
literally, "There a Lick."

_Mohican-ittuck_, the old name for the Hudson River, means the river of
the Mohicans, whose hunting-grounds were along its upper reaches.

_Niagara_ probably means something in connection with the river at that
point, the narrows, or the neck. According to the old spelling it should
have been pronounced Nee-ae-gaer'-ae, but it isn't.

_Adirondack_ means "Bark-Eaters," a local name for the tribe that once
lived there and in seasons of scarcity ate the inner bark of the
birch tree.

_Algonquian_ is a name for one of the great tribal groups, several
members of which occupied the New England country at the beginning of
our history. The name probably means "Place of the Fish-Spearing," in
reference to the prow of the canoe, which was occupied by the man with
the fish spear. The Eastern Algonquians were all canoers.

_Wabaniki_ means "Eastlanders," people living toward the East.

The American Indians, like all other people in the world, believed in
supernatural beings of many sorts, spirits of woods and rocks,
Underwater People and an Underworld. They had stories of ghosts and
flying heads and giants. Most of the tribes believed in animals that,
when they were alone, laid off their animal skins and thought and
behaved as men. Some of them thought of the moon and stars as other
worlds like ours, inhabited by people like us who occasionally came to
earth and took away with them mortals whom they loved. In the various
tribal legends can be found the elements of almost every sort of
European fairy tale.

_Shaman_ is not an Indian word at all, but has been generally adopted as
a term of respect to indicate men or women who became wise in the things
of the spirit. Sometimes a knowledge of healing herbs was included in
the Shaman's education, and often he gave advice on personal matters.
But the chief business of the Shaman was to keep man reconciled with the
spirit world, to persuade it to be on his side, or to prevent the
spirits from doing him harm. A Shaman was not a priest, nor was he
elected to office, and in some tribes he did not even go to war, but
stayed at home to protect the women and children. Any one could be a
Shaman who thought himself equal to it and could persuade people to
believe in him.

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